Лорел Гамильтон - Dead Ice

I DIDN’T LIKE having someone else drive my SUV, ever, but having them drive it because I was too emotionally overwrought about something that had happened several years ago just pissed me off. It felt weak, and I hated that. I wanted to aim all that self-loathing and pissiness at someone, and Nathaniel was sitting right there behind the wheel of MY car, driving me to MY job, because I was having some sort of internal crisis that I couldn’t fucking handle. But it was Nathaniel and I loved him too much to take it out on him, which was probably why the other men in my life had picked him to chauffeur me. I hated being managed like this, but it was working, so I sat in the dark in the passenger seat and watched the headlights from the other cars, my arms crossed, and sort of huddling on my anger. I’d moved my gun from the small of the back to my right side, so it didn’t dig in while I sat in the car. I was loving my new innerpants holster, though if I kept moving it around too much the leather wouldn’t conform to my body the way it was designed to. It would be dark enough at the cemetery that I wouldn’t accidentally flash the clients, but even that made me grumpy. Why should I have to hide my gun from clients when they knew I was a marshal? I so wanted to pick a fight with someone, but not with Nathaniel, and that was what Jean-Claude, or more likely Micah, had counted on. Damn it.

I glanced at Nathaniel as he drove, hands precise and careful. He didn’t really like driving at night, and I knew that, so I’d be even less likely to pick at him. Nathaniel was also one third of my ménage à trois with Micah, and one of the last few that we all agreed should get a ring in whatever ceremony we finally decided on, and on the heels of that thought was that the weretigers were pushing us to include one of them in the commitment ceremony. The anger flared over my skin in a shiver of power, and distant as a dream I “saw” all the colors of tiger that I held inside me—white, red, black, blue, and gold—stare up at me.

Nathaniel shivered as he got the bleed-off from the burst of power, my beasts peeking out. He tried to rub one hand down his arm, but that moved the wheel too much and the car did a slight swerve. He put both hands back on the wheel, but I couldn’t afford to distract him like that. He was my leopard to call, which made us so much more intimate metaphysically than just being in love ever could. I had to be the big, tough dominant personality and swallow the rage. It was an indulgence I couldn’t afford right now. Yeah, the men in my life had managed me nicely, putting me with the other love of my life tonight.

I worked at letting go of the anger, and made myself look at him and remember how much I loved him, and how much I wanted to protect him. Me shoving my energy all over him and making us wreck was just stupid, and I tried not to do stupid. Nathaniel was dimmed in the darkness of the car, so that his thick braid looked brown, his skin almost gray-white; only an occasional streetlight flashing over showed the hair’s rich auburn, the skin’s clear, bright, almost luminous undertone that most people on the redhead spectrum seem to have. He glanced at me once, and a stray bit of light turned the grayed eyes to their true pale purple, like spring lilacs.

“At least you’re looking at me, that’s a start,” he said, and went back to watching the road.

“I’m sorry, but my mood was bad enough that saying nothing was the best I had.”

“I know,” he said, softly, as he hit the turn signal before changing lanes with the dark line of cars, their headlights like glowing beads on a string, as the last of rush hour trickled away.

“I love that you understood that, and hate it at the same time, which doesn’t make any sense at all, does it?”

“It makes sense for you,” he said.

“What kind of answer is that?” I said, and it sounded grumpy. There was another whisper of energy, and I took a deep breath in slow, and let it out slow, trying to ease the tension in my shoulders. I forced myself to sit up straighter and not hunch around my anger.

He gave me a sideways glance, frowning, and he was less handsome that way than when he smiled, but not by much. There wasn’t much Nathaniel could do to spoil his beauty, and he worked hard at making the most of his assets by hitting the gym regularly, watching what he ate, and keeping his hair at near ankle length. He’d finally had to trim a few dead ends so that the braid curled around him didn’t actually touch his ankles anymore. I’d have strangled myself to death by accident if my hair had ever been that long, but he wore the hair like he did most things, gracefully; but then cats are known for that kind of thing and he was a wereleopard like Micah. I wondered if he’d always been this graceful, and because I could, I asked.

“Were you always this graceful, or is it the whole wereleopard thing?”

He looked at me and smiled. “I don’t know about graceful, but I got spotted at the YMCA as a toddler and recruited into gymnastics, so I must have been more coordinated, or something.”

“I didn’t know you took gymnastics.”

“I did until my mom got cancer. My aunt took me for a while, but then Mom died and my stepfather didn’t think it was manly enough. He kept taking Nicholas to baseball, and he tried to get me into that, but I was never good at anything that involved hitting a ball. I could catch, but I couldn’t throw, so I was shoved off into far left field where the coach probably prayed nothing too complicated would come my way.” He laughed softly.

It sounded so ordinary, like a lot of people’s childhoods, but I knew that at seven he’d witnessed his stepfather beat his older brother, Nicholas, to death. I had even shared the memory of that other little boy yelling, “Run, Nathaniel, run!” and Nathaniel had run. He’d run away, and been on the streets as a child prostitute by age ten. I’d never asked what happened between ages seven and ten.

This was the first time he’d offered anything positive about his stepfather, and I had a hard time reconciling a dad who would take the kids to Little League practice with the monster I’d seen swinging a baseball bat at those same boys. How could you be both? How could you do both?

“That’s the most positive thing I’ve ever heard you say about him.”

“Years of therapy and I can finally say that my stepdad wasn’t always a monster. I don’t remember much of him before Mom got sick, but that’s when he started drinking. He was different when he drank; it was as if he became his rage like I become a leopard. When you first change shape you don’t always have much control, and you don’t remember what you did when you wake up the next morning. It’s not that different from getting blind drunk, except as a wereanimal you have weapons instantly that can tear and claw, and rip people up.”

“You were with the local wereleopards here when it happened the first time, though, right? Gabriel, your old leader, may not have been as powerful a dominant as Micah, but he was strong enough to make sure his cats didn’t go out killing people when they shifted. Or do you mean he used the new leopards in some of their snuff films?”

“No, even Gabriel saw his duty as head of our pard better than that. That would have been a betrayal that we could have taken to other wereleopard groups and used as an excuse to ask for sanctuary. One of the few rules all animal groups hold to is that you take care of the fresh meat, so they don’t have anything to regret when they first change shape.”

“Okay, good. Gabriel was a sexual sadist and a lot of bad things, but you told me he got you off drugs before he’d change you into a wereleopard. That made me assume he’d been more careful of you when you first shapeshifted.”